Andrea here, writing this while hurricane warnings are flying fast and furious where I live in New England as Tropical Storm Henri bears down on us. I don’t take this stuff lightly as I was at Ground Zero when Hurricane Sandy and experienced first-hand how devastating Nature can be.
Climate threats seem to be intensifying all over the world, from the terrible fires in Australia and the Western United States to catastrophic flooding in Europe and Asia, as well as droughts and dangerous heat waves in areas that haven’t suffered such things before. It’s terrifying, but it got me to thinking about the history, and how natural disasters had a profound effect on past eras, too.
One just has to look at Regency era, when the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in the islands of the Dutch East Indies —modern-day Indonesia—wreaked havoc around the globe, including in Britain. The explosion is the most powerful volcanic eruption ever measured (100 times more powerful than Mount St. Helens.) The ash and various chemicals and gases thrown into the atmosphere—including carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and hydrogen chloride—affected the entire world. Temperatures dropped . . . with devastating effects that played out over the following few years.
When the initial explosion took place, most of Europe was far more focused on the drama playing out closer to home on the battlefield of Waterloo. However, winter was unusually cold, and it was a harbinger of worse to come. 1816 was known as the Year Without a Summer. In Britain and Ireland, cold temperatures and heavy rains ruined the harvest, causing food shortages and outright famines in many areas. Wheat, oats and potatoes—all staples of daily life—were especially hard hit. Giant hailstones fell throughout the summer months in London. Hungry crowds rioted over the lack of bread.
The rest of the world suffered similar plights. In the Northeast of America, a dry red-tinged fog hung over the region, blocking sunlight, and neither rain nor winds seemed to disperse it. Heavy snows fell in June and July, both in New England and eastern Canada. As a result, livestock died and crops failed. Exacerbated by the weather changes, typhus epidemics broke out in southern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean area. The German principalities suffered the worst famine of the 19th century. And in India, the monsoons were altered by the odd weather patterns, causing massive harvest failures. A cholera pandemic took hold there in 1817 and spread around the world, killing millions.
The effects of the changes in weather affected other areas of life. The New York Times ran a fascinating article on the Tambora volcanic eruption and its effects, and mentions a book, Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World,” by Gillen D’Arcy Wood, which posits that the event also had an influence on the artistic world. Many of the famous artists of the day—especially J. M. W. Turner and John Constable—depicted particularly dramatic skies with fiery sunsets or strangely ominous clouds in their paintings.
Even more interesting, it suggested that the cold and rainy weather in Switzerland—where famine forced the government to declare a national emergency—compelled Lord Byron, along with his fellow travelers Percy and Mary Shelley and John Poldari, to hole up in their lakeside villa, where they entertained themselves writing ghost stories. Wood is of the opinion that Frankenstein, the resulting story by Mary Shelley, as well as Byron’s poem Darkness, were likely inspired by the grimness that gripped the world.
I also took a quick look at a list of other volcano eruptions around the same time, and saw that there was also a terrible eruption in 1783 in Iceland, where the massive amounts of sulfur dioxide killed nearly a quarter of its population. It’s also thought that 23,000 people in Britain died from the poisonous air. And then of course, there’s the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 . . . It was certainly not a good century for the Earth.
So, although it’s of no comfort at all, our current angst over natural disasters is not new. Nature, when aroused to a fury, can be a force of terrifying destruction.
So what about you? Have you been affected by the recent weather events around the world? Or have you any memorable weather stories to recount from the past?
